Chapter 23: The Transcript
A plea transcript is the strangest document in an American court file.
It is forty-one pages of two people talking, typed by a third person who is not allowed to have an opinion.
It is the only place in the entire file where anybody speaks.
Everything else is written about you. This is written down as you say it.
Mine ran from 9:41 in the morning to 10:22.
Forty-one minutes. Forty-one pages. That is not meaningful.
It is just how a transcript runs, about a page a minute. I noticed it and wrote it in the margin anyway.
The formatting is fixed. Q and A do not appear. Speaker labels in capitals, flush left. THE COURT. MR. LAZENBY. MS. MERCER.
Lazenby was my lawyer. Court appointed, forty-one cases that month, a good man with no hours in his day.
The first six pages are appearances and preliminaries.
Then the plea agreement is read into the record, and the terms are recited, and it takes four pages.
Then the court turns to me, and from page eleven to page thirty-one it is almost entirely two people, and one of them is me.
I am going to describe what a plea colloquy is, because most people have only seen it on television and television gets it wrong by making it short.
It is not short. It is a checklist.
The judge has to walk every line of it, because if he skips one the plea can be attacked later.
Are you Cass Mercer.
How old are you.
How far did you go in school.
Have you had any alcohol or drugs in the last twenty-four hours.
Are you currently under the care of a physician for any mental condition.
Do you understand the charge against you.
Do you understand the maximum penalty.
Do you understand you are giving up your right to a trial by jury.
Your right to confront the witnesses against you.
Your right to remain silent.
Your right to require the State to prove every element beyond a reasonable doubt.
Has anyone threatened you or forced you in any way to plead guilty.
Has anyone made you any promise other than what is in the agreement.
Are you pleading guilty of your own free will.
Are you pleading guilty because you are in fact guilty.
Twenty pages of that. Line after line, in a room with eleven people in it on a Tuesday morning.
And down the left margin, over and over, in a typeface that has not changed since typewriters, my own name.
MS. MERCER: Yes, Your Honor.
MS. MERCER: Yes, Your Honor.
MS. MERCER: No, Your Honor.
MS. MERCER: I understand.
I counted them. Of course I counted them.
I said Your Honor forty-one times in forty-one pages.
Then there is the factual basis, which is where the prosecutor stands up and recites what the State would prove if it had to.
It is one paragraph. It is eleven lines long. It contains the road, the time, the vehicle, the chemical result, and the name Nadine Okoro.
And then the court asks the defendant whether the recitation is substantially correct.
MS. MERCER: Yes, Your Honor.
Then allocution, at sentencing, on page thirty-six. Three sentences. I have not read them out loud since and I am not going to write them here.
Then the sentence.
Six years. Concurrent counts. Credit for time served, which was eleven days, and those eleven days are the only part of the sentence anybody in that room argued about.
Lazenby asked for probation with conditions and he asked well, and the answer was six years, and the answer took about nineteen seconds to deliver.
Here is the thing about reading your own colloquy six years later at a card table.
Every single answer in it is technically correct except two.
I understood the charge. I understood the maximum. I understood the rights I was giving up. I was not threatened. I was not under a physician's care. I was twenty-four. I had two years of university. Nobody promised me anything that was not in the agreement.
All of that is true and it is on the record and it would survive any attack anybody could make on it.
Two answers were false, and they are the two the entire building is built on, and they are each one word long.
I gave them in a clear voice, standing up, at 10:04 in the morning, to a judge who asked me the right question in the right order and had no way on earth to know.
That is what a plea colloquy is for. It is a machine for making sure a person means it.
It worked perfectly. I meant it.
I put the transcript face down on the pile at ten past midnight and I squared the pile.
There were forty-three pages left.